Delivered ads to the top position of Facebook's newsfeed, a $1B+ annual opportunity.
Facebook never showed ads in the top position of newsfeed. It was thought it would be a bad user experience to open the app and immediately see an ad, and the time required to prepare an ad for the top position was significantly longer than the time to prepare an organic story from a friend. A data science analysis estimated the opportunity at $1B+ annually, but it faced internal resistance across organic feed teams and leadership and was considered technically infeasible at the required latency. The assumed path was a large-scale ranking overhaul requiring 40+ engineers over multiple years.
I redesigned the approach. Rather than waiting on the full backend rebuild, I built a first-phase architecture using session-aware cached ads. By filtering for sessions with high-value, relevant cached ads, we could serve the first slot without deep ranking changes. This reduced projected headcount from 40+ to around 10, removed critical dependencies, and accelerated launch by roughly a year while preserving alignment with the longer-term ranking improvements planned as phase two.
Any delays in feed loading can trickle down to impact DAUs and other critical metrics, so the tradeoffs had to be carefully validated. We defined revenue-per-time-spent success criteria and positioned this as the highest-return monetization option. We encountered several issues on the Android and iOS app side around how changing expectations for first ad position impacted existing delivery systems and application startup.
The team started at 3 in 2021, grew to 10 in early 2022, and then to 40+ in late 2022 as we neared shipping. When the project became resource-constrained, I gave an org-wide technical talk outlining the architecture and economic case, which led three backend engineers to transfer temporarily and unblock a critical path. The cached-ads phase alone generated over $500M annually, validating the economics ahead of the deeper backend rollout. The project shipped in H1 2023.